The Basic Fundamentals of an Integrated B2B Marketing Campaign

What is a marketer’s foremost challenge? Sometimes; its generating strong and qualified leads.

Every modern marketing team will likely agree. According to a HubSpot report, 61% of seasoned marketing believe that they find it hard to generate qualifying leads. And, 58% of the businesses reported that they choose quality over quantity of leads;

There is a conflict of interest among marketers, which is further aggravated by the term ‘campaign.’ When we say a marketing campaign, it may mean a social media campaign for one marketer and a traditional display of ads for the other. So, what is the solution? How do you bring everyone on the same platform?

A simple solution we suggest is an integrated B2B marketing campaign, which combines all forms of marketing intending to reach out to the target audience. The primary goal of an integrated B2B marketing campaign is to generate traffic, and brand awareness, and drive higher conversions by leveraging as many marketing channels as possible such as content, emails, display ads, social media, and many more.

Why B2B companies should think of an integrated marketing campaign?

Have you heard of ‘Rule 7’ in marketing? The rule says that your prospective clients must come across your brand at least seven times until they notice it and do something about it. Remember, that must happen only at the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey.

Converting these leads into real buyers will take another 5-7 touchpoints to interact with the customers and in the end, it can become a long and complex B2B sales cycle. With the help of an integrated marketing campaign, you can convert the long-form process into a strategy and ensure that every interaction that you have with your potential client is intentional and connected.

How do you do it?

Well, a lot of factors are involved in creating a fool-proof integrated marketing campaign.

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The following steps will show you the way to do it.

1. Outline your campaign goals

Defining your campaign goals is the first step to ensuring the success of your B2B integrated marketing campaign. While most marketers make the mistake of measuring the success of an integrated marketing campaign by the volume of leads or the quality of leads, ideally it should be measured by full-funnel marketing success. So what types of goals should you have?

Let’s not go too far and check the ones given below:

• Customer Type: Personas and target accounts.
• Budget
• Marketing-Qualified Leads
• Sales-qualified Leads
• Closed-won deals

2. Know your customer personas

The next step is knowing your customer personas. In case you haven’t taken enough time to complete your buyer persona profiles, it is time to do it now. Some questions to cater to this requirement are:

• What industry your potential customer deals in?
• What is their ideal business?
• How many employees work for them?
• How do they measure their professional success?
• What kind of conferences and industry events do they attend?

3. Ensure that you have the right team members

The success of your B2B integrated marketing campaign also narrows down to the people; the right team members. Even though you have an integrated program plan, it will work only under the leadership of resilient contributors and collaborators. In case you do not have a proficient team, try outsourcing some tasks.

4. Develop a strong and relevant message

Your message to the audience is important. A message can be a story or an idea revolving around your products, and offerings, and it should communicate your thoughts in the market well.

For example, you want to develop a campaign about the specific capabilities of your offerings, and here, your message must center around your target audience’s pain points and offer them a solution.

5. Determine the right marketing channels

Integrated marketing entails a multichannel approach. The modern B2B marketers adopt an increasingly high number of earned, paid, and owned channels for a detailed demand generation. The top converting channels according to a survey are emails, paid search, websites, online ads, and social media.

Study your target audience and hit the right marketing channel for your marketing campaign.

6. Plan to nurture the leads

Once everything is set as per the plan, your leads will start rolling in, and the next step is to nurture the leads. For better conversions, it is essential to nurture the leads that you acquire from the campaign. Do not overwhelm them with constant cold calling, abundant emails, etc. Put positive efforts to stay on the top of their minds.

7. Measure and track the performance

Finally, it is time to track and measure the performance. Of course, a successful B2B integrated marketing campaign will require consistent efforts. If you are observing results pouring in, you should keep an eye on everything and measure the performance to analyze the effectiveness of all your efforts.

Wrapping up

A well-rounded B2B integrated marketing campaign is likely to capture the attention of your target audience. Like all the elements of marketing, patience remains critical here.

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